treating payments as product

Focus on historically underserved users: immigrants and SMBs (small and midsized businesses)
Stripe solves the accounts receivable side very well (how much money do I have?)
- In order for SMBs to pay their providers (who do I owe?) they have to bring in another provider outside of Stripe
Shopify offers "Shopify Capital" as a way to inject funds to small businesses.
How does an immigrant build credit? How do we solve this problem?
- Cash isn't good enough in order to thrive in the new country.
only 30% of payments for businesses are done electronically on Xero
- Checks are still predominant
Payments is now a major revenue stream for Shopify
- Expanding their financing and billing platform
Creating a seamless experience

How much of the payments stack do you bring in house?

Standard Connect
- Xero uses this. Their aspiration is to build the best accounting platform.
- Xero would rather focus their energy on building a better end product and partner with Stripe on the risk management/settlement.
Custom Connect (whitelabel)
- Shopify uses this, (4k employees)
- build vs buy vs partner vs acquire vs fork
- Shopify is a commerce company, not a payments company

How do you figure out which markets to prioritize?

Remitly founder spent time in Kenya and it allowed him to better understand the problem
Some markets make sense to launch together (ones with similar local compliance requirements)
- Launching Canada and US are two completely different compliance markets
Next big bet is Asia Pacific
Shopify payments are available in 10 countries
Real creativity comes when constraints are applied.
- Strike the balance between feature development and infrastructure.

Closing thoughts

Payouts are hard due to the fragility of the destination
Would be great in the future to have a closed loop: have payouts and payin ride the same rails
More collaboration with the government
We're still stuck with ACH after all these years in US.

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